Chapter One
Before the Shellacking

“WE KNEW THIS WOULDN’T BE EASY.”

It was mid-May 2010—half a year before his big decision on a tax-cut deal—and President Barack Obama was addressing hundreds of high-dollar Democratic contributors (celebrities, financiers, power players) from a stage in a ballroom at the ritzy St. Regis hotel in New York City. The goal, as at every fund-raiser, was to squeeze them for money. He had to show them something special, reveal a little bit of himself and his thoughts, so they would feel part of his presidency and attuned to his vision.

Obama was not an enthusiastic fund-raiser. Some politicians actually enjoy grubbing for money—not him. After he became president, some big-dollar donors grumbled about the lack of attention the White House paid to its wealthy contributors. There weren’t sufficient invitations to the White House or requests for advice. Fair or not, this was regarded as a reflection of Obama’s own jaundiced view toward the money chase. But when Obama wanted to reach out and touch the donors, he could. And now he truly needed to mobilize—and motivate—his party’s money people.

Two months earlier, the Democrats in Congress had finally passed Obama’s comprehensive but controversial health care overhaul. Tens of millions of Americans would eventually obtain health insurance coverage (which would be subsidized for low-income recipients); insurance companies would be prevented from denying coverage to customers with preexisting conditions; young adults could remain on their parents’ plans; older Americans would receive additional assistance in paying for medicine.

But the passage of this landmark law, which included an individual mandate that would compel people to obtain coverage (to the horror of conservatives), had not won Obama much, if any, political credit. The whole effort had exhausted Washington and alienated independent voters, especially those who wondered if Obama’s devotion to this reform had come at the expense of repairing the still-tattered economy.

The president had been left with a let-me-explain, hard-to-understand win that had prompted rage on the right and fired up the Tea Party forces now threatening his party.

Unemployment had topped 9.5 percent for nearly a year, and the president’s approval rating was just below 50 percent. Congressional Democrats were faring worse. In Gallup polls, approval of the Democratic Party, which controlled both the Senate and the House, had plummeted in the past year from 55 to 41 percent. Republicans, who had embraced a consistent stance of anti-Obamaism, had crept up from 34 percent to 42. One survey showed that more than 70 percent of the public disapproved of the Congress.

All this confirmed the obvious: Obama and the Democrats were hurtling toward a cliff in the 2010 midterm elections. And for months leading up to the St. Regis fund-raiser, strategists at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the outfit tasked with preserving the Democratic majority in the House, had been urging the White House to unleash the president.

They wanted Obama to mount up and lead the charge against the say-no-to-everything Republicans. Obama’s aides, though, were not eager to set Obama loose as a partisan bulldozer—which aggravated the Democratic strategists. “They’d say, ‘Look, the president won the 2008 election because he was beyond politics,’ ” one House Democrat recalled.

But at this swanky $15,000-a-person event featuring food prepared by chefs of the French Culinary Institute, with actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in the crowd, Obama was delivering his first campaign speech of the season. After those months of back-and-forth between the White House and the DCCC, he was finally leaping into the 2010 mix. With gusto.

“I hope you knew” that it would be tough, he told the faithful. “Because I told you. If you didn’t know, you weren’t paying attention at my inauguration address. Remember that? Washington, couple million people, really cold?”

He pounced on the Republicans: “You would have thought at a time of historic crisis that Republican leaders would have been more willing to help us find a way out of this mess—particularly since they created the mess.”

Unsheathing the biting sense of humor he only rarely displayed in public, Obama went on: “We got our mops and our brooms out, we’re cleaning stuff out, and they’re sitting there saying, ‘Hold the broom better.’ ‘That’s not how you mop.’ Don’t tell me how to mop. Pick up a mop!” The well-heeled Democratic loyalists laughed loudly.

Obama insisted that the GOP strategy had been “to gum up the works; to make things look broken.” And “if it didn’t work out so well, maybe the other side would take the blame.” He was on a roll: “So after they drove the car into the ditch . . . now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive! We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch! We just got the car out!”

Representative Chris Van Hollen, the bright-eyed congressman from Maryland who headed the DCCC, flashed a thumbs-up at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was also at the dinner. The president was using the car-in-the-ditch line Van Hollen had been quipping for months. But Van Hollen wasn’t thrilled merely because Obama had cribbed a talking point from him. More important, the president was at last doing what House Democratic strategists had yearned for: pounding the Republicans.

But was this coming too late? House Democratic strategists would be disappointed that the president did not constantly pummel the Republicans over the coming weeks. This going-back-into-a-ditch point, they believed, could not be repeated often enough. Yet Obama tended to push this theme mostly at fund-raising events.

At the White House, Obama’s aides believed the president was indeed accommodating congressional Democratic desires.

“The back-versus-forward message was hatched around a table with Nancy Pelosi, her leadership team, and Axe,” recalled a senior White House official. “It was not the message we would have chosen. We would have preferred a message closer to our 2008 message of reforming Washington. But this is what the House and Senate felt made sense, and we wanted to do what they wanted.”

Even so, the president’s speech at the St. Regis included little on what he and the Democrats would do in the months ahead to improve the economic fortunes of the millions of Americans still facing or fearing rough circumstances.

“At that time in general,” a senior House Democrat later commented, “there was a question whether Obama was making it totally clear to the public that he was focused on jobs and the economy.” One DCCC strategist put it bluntly: “We had no economic narrative.”

The absence of a compelling and convincing economic message would be a central problem in the months ahead. A vibrant recovery had yet to arrive—and Obama and the Democrats were in charge. A but-for-us-things-could-have-been-worse platform would be difficult to campaign on, however true that might be. Obama needed to persuade voters that he was engaged in concrete actions to revive the economy and create jobs.

Obama did have ideas—such as a proposed $30 billion small business lending program he had promoted at a Buffalo manufacturing plant hours before flying to New York City for that fund-raiser. But the White House did not have an aggressive create-jobs-now blueprint to tout. The administration had even engaged in a fierce debate about whether to concoct such a plan.

THE WEEK BEFORE OBAMA’S SPEECH, AT A PRIVATE MEETING with liberal advocates in Washington, Larry Summers, the director of the president’s National Economic Council, was asked why Obama was not speaking more boldly and clearly about job creation.

Summers, the former Harvard University president who had served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton years, was seen as imperious by many inside and outside the White House, and progressive policy advocates in town considered him and Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner a centrist, pro–Wall Street cell in the administration that was blocking more populist economic measures and messages.

Summers had been a cheerleader for financial deregulation in the Clinton years; Geithner had been president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a key player in the bailout bonanza that saved the titans of Wall Street who had behaved irresponsibly on his watch. When Obama placed his all-important economic policies in the hands of these two men, it sent a signal that he was receptive to the needs of Big Finance, even while he vowed reform.

Still, Summers and Geithner were not always the pro-corporate obstructionists their critics envisioned. At times, they were stymied by the administration’s politicos.

Summers informed the liberal advocates that the White House did not have much in the works regarding new and extensive job-creating initiatives. He and other policy people in the administration believed the government still needed to goose the economy, but he blamed “the political folks” in the White House for shifting toward deficit reduction. Summers’s audience drew the conclusion that Obama and his strategists were concerned about polls showing that many voters—especially independents—had absorbed Republican talking points: Obama had spent too much money, the stimulus had not worked, and the government needed to go on a starvation diet.

A few days later, Peter Orszag, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and a fierce deficit hawk, privately told a few of these policy advocates that the White House was definitely pivoting toward deficit reduction. He said that the White House had calculated that any new stimulus proposed by the president would die in the Senate.

According to Orszag, the plan was for the president to act and look serious on the deficit in the near term to accrue political credibility that could later be redeemed to win job-boosting government spending—maybe a modest $100 to $200 billion—in 2011 and 2012, in time for Obama’s reelection. (Months earlier, during his first State of the Union address, Obama had talked more about his steps to reduce spending—freezing certain government spending, creating a deficit-reduction commission—than about creating jobs.)

Orszag’s message was unambiguous: forget about more spending to create jobs this year. The Obama White House was tapped out.

THROUGHOUT THE PAST MONTHS, OBAMA’S WHITE HOUSE HAD been conflicted over what to do about the sickly economy. The previous fall, much of the president’s economic team had concluded that the recession was worse than they had anticipated.

Yet its members couldn’t agree on how to respond. Larry Summers; Christina Romer, the academic who chaired the president’s Council of Economic Advisers; and Jared Bernstein, the labor-friendly advocate who was Biden’s chief economic aide, were each keen on more stimulus—not another $800 billion, but several hundred billions of dollars.

Orszag, an establishment-oriented economist who had once headed the Congressional Budget Office, was more concerned with the looming deficit. Geithner, who had worked for Summers at Treasury during the Clinton administration, believed that the economy could use another $400 to $500 billion shot in the arm, but he preferred that such a boost be tied to a deficit-reduction strategy. Geithner, though, was often hard to read.

“He holds his cards close,” a past colleague said. “You’re never quite sure what he’s saying to the president or what he believes.”

“There was discombobulation,” a former senior administration official later complained. “No coherence within the economic team.”

It didn’t help that Summers and Orszag disliked each other. Or that Geithner believed Summers often blocked policy ideas that did not originate with Larry Summers. Moreover, others in the White House—chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, and the legislative shop led by Phil Schiliro—had concluded that it would be politically near impossible to do anything big.

“We kept fighting the same fights in front of the president,” Romer recalled. “He was frustrated about where the economy was, where the politics were, and he was frustrated by the economic team.”

When Obama met with his economic aides, Romer would constantly assert that more stimulus was necessary. (She, too, worried about deficits, but didn’t want to clamp down until the economy was in a better place.) At one meeting, when Romer was making her now-routine argument for more stimulus, Obama interrupted her: “I can’t get it done. Don’t you understand that?”

The original stimulus had become a political albatross—rendering the economic team’s internal debates almost moot. Moreover, the ever-uphill push for health care reform was consuming most of the available oxygen. Obama had contended that his health care overhaul was essential to improving the jobs picture—and he had strong policy arguments for that case. Yet when the legislation was passed, it was not regarded as a jobs initiative.

“The bill was hard to comprehend,” a top administration official later said. “The process was hard to follow. Voters saw him fiddling, while jobs were not being created.”

ON APRIL 20, 2010, AN EXPLOSION OCCURRED ON THE BP-licensed Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and the president and his aides were overwhelmed by the worst environmental disaster in decades.

The BP oil spill added to the already present sense of crisis. A Greek financial crunch was roiling markets and confidence around the world. Stock prices were falling. The forecasts from earlier in the year predicting the US economy would rebound were not holding up. And as the oil gushed into the sea, the president could do nothing to stop it. He asked Defense secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, if the US government had any technology that could be used—maybe a secret submarine—to plug this hole in the seafloor. The answer: no. Robert Gibbs recalled that the spill “gave people a sense of futility.”

“This was the worst possible crisis for us,” Ron Klain, Biden’s then chief of staff, subsequently said. “Our own progressive allies were criticizing our response and driving the idea of government incompetence, which would only lead to less support for government action on the economy: ‘Hey, if you can’t clean up the oil, how can you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to create jobs?’ ”

White House aides were quite touchy on this front. They believed that criticism of Obama from the left or the right eroded public faith in the president and in government generally, making it more difficult for the administration to propose solutions.

“If we really had given too much money to the banks in TARP funds, cozied up to drug companies with health care reform, and were in bed with BP, why would you trust us with hundreds of billions of dollars?” a former senior administration official later said.

And if the critics on the left were claiming that over $800 billion of stimulus hadn’t worked, that made it hard to argue that more money should be spent on similar measures.

Throughout the spring, the president pored over the economic data routinely dumped on his desk, looking for positive signs. “Maybe this is just about to get better,” he told aides. The president, Gibbs recalled, was hoping to catch a break on something, anything—just some good news.

“But whatever scenarios we envisioned,” Gibbs said, “it always turned out to be a little worse.”

IN JUNE, BIDEN LAUNCHED “RECOVERY SUMMER,” A SIX-WEEK-long tour to highlight projects made possible by the stimulus. The vice president was optimistic that by pointing to examples of stimulus dollars being spent on productive projects—roads, bridges, and the rest—the administration could shove public opinion in a positive direction. The tour never gained traction.

“The summer didn’t feel very recovery-ish,” a Biden aide subsequently observed. A similar effort to promote the health care reform act also fizzled.

“The trick was to make it clear that Obama’s main focus was still jobs and the economy,” one aide said, “when there was so much to deal with—the firing of General McChrystal [the top US commander in Afghanistan who had insulted administration officials in a Rolling Stone interview], the oil spill. And in the states, Democratic candidates were getting the shit knocked out of them on ‘Obamacare’ and deficits by Republican and conservative outside groups spending tens of millions of dollars.”

A former senior White House official recalled, “The oil spill was the moment when we realized we had no chance in the November elections. The world seemed going to shit. The president was doing his best, but it was impossible to get credit.”

IN MID-JULY, CONGRESS FINALLY APPROVED THE WALL STREET reform bill that the president had been championing. The law rewrote rules governing financial institutions to address systemic risks and lessen the odds that a future financial meltdown could trigger another recession. Wall Street critics griped that the legislation did not go far enough, while Republicans shrieked that it would handcuff financial firms and cause them to lose a competitive edge in the international marketplace.

A prominent provision set up an independent office called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau within the Federal Reserve; its mandate was to prevent financial firms such as banks, credit card companies, and mortgage lenders from exploiting consumers with tricks and traps. But the overall legislation was complicated, addressing a complex set of problems—and not easy for voters to sort out.

Again, Obama did not score much political profit from this victory—possibly because he never fully decided whether to blame or court Wall Street. He had vacillated between slamming Big Finance for causing the US economy to collapse while also trying to win over its leaders. In pressing for the Wall Street reform bill, Obama had rarely called out the specific financial firms that had unleashed an army of lobbyists to stop or weaken the measure.

White House aides frequently told Obama that there was great antipathy within the business community toward him. The president and his advisers considered this irrational. Hadn’t Obama saved the economy from going over the cliff? He had supported the vastly unpopular bailout of financial firms. He had rescued the about-to-collapse auto industry.

“It wasn’t lost on us that stabilizing the major financial institutions at the heart of the crisis was the worst politics in the world,” Gene Sperling, a senior economic adviser, later said. “We took the steps we did because we had absolutely no other choice if we were going to prevent a serious risk of another meltdown that would have harmed tens of millions of working families.”

Obama had occasionally tossed off a dash of populist rhetoric. Once—just once—he publicly referred to “fat-cat bankers on Wall Street,” while denouncing multimillion-dollar bonuses given to financial executives, and he had passionately supported the CFPB, which the financial community bitterly opposed, especially given the possibility that Elizabeth Warren, the populist Harvard law professor who cooked up the idea for this watchdog office, might become its first chief. (Obama would tap her to set up the CFPB but not to run it.)

But the president had not urged Americans to grab their pitchforks and march on Wall Street. He had disappointed progressives by not making a sustained effort to capitalize on populist anger. Yet for all his reasonableness, business leaders considered him the enemy.

Summers thought Obama needed to choose a side: either blast Wall Street consistently (and capture that populist energy) or reach something of an accommodation with the ringleaders of finance and industry. Not surprisingly, Summers favored the latter. He believed that if those in the business community were confident and prepared to invest more, that would help generate economic growth—the name of the game for him. (Naturally, Geithner was not a champion of revved-up financial regulation; he wasn’t a fan of the CFPB and was widely regarded as hostile toward Warren.)

Summers feared that Obama was like a person on a boat who runs from starboard to port and back again, placing the vessel in jeopardy of tipping. The president would assail Wall Street—enough to tick off business leaders but not enough to register deeply with voters. Then he’d reach out to business leaders and meet with them. Later those same leaders would complain to White House aides that these sessions were counterproductive, that they felt Obama had lectured them, and that when he asked them for suggestions, there was not much follow-up from the White House.

Obama and his aides weren’t worried that wrathful corporate leaders would take their hefty political contributions elsewhere. They were concerned that constant carping from CEOs would influence how independent voters perceived the president.

A steady stream of corporate grousing about the president—even if Wall Street had screwed the rest of the nation—could cause these Americans to question whether Obama really knew what he was doing concerning the economy. Obama and his aides fretted that such a perception could lessen his chances of winning reelection.

AS THE YEAR PROGRESSED, OBAMA HAD TO CONSIDER WHAT TO do about the Bush tax cuts. As a candidate, he had vowed—no ifs, ands, or buts—to end the Bush tax breaks for the rich. But there was a problem. Obama had also pledged not to raise taxes on people who pulled in less than $250,000.

If all the Bush tax cuts expired at the end of the year, middle-class Americans would see their tax bills expand. To keep both pledges, Obama would have to detach the top-bracket tax breaks from the middle-class tax cuts and pass legislation to continue only the latter. Republicans could be expected to holler and do whatever they could to block this.

In late July, Geithner, who considered the Bush tax cuts for the rich an impediment to fiscal balance, hit the Sunday morning talk shows and declared that the administration favored letting the tax breaks for the wealthy perish. He dismissed the GOP arguments that allowing tax rates on the wealthy to rise would impede economic growth.

A week later, Geithner again ripped into the Bush tax cuts: “There is no credible argument to be made that the purpose of government is to borrow from future generations of Americans to finance an extension of tax cuts for the top two percent.”

He called it a weak way to stimulate the economy and “a $700 billion fiscal mistake.” He batted away the GOP contention that ending these tax cuts would be bad for small businesses, noting that only 3 percent of small businesses would be affected by the expiration of these tax cuts.

But Obama and others at the White House were not interested in having this battle yet.

“There was no evidence that the White House wanted this fight now,” said an outside Obama adviser. “Tim and his people were saying, ‘Let’s set this up and have a vote.’ But there was no traction in the White House. He went out and laid the groundwork. Then there was nothing.”

Larry Summers, for one, “didn’t think there was a voter jihad in America against high-income tax cuts and was skeptical of a political strategy to have the defining issue be about high-income tax cuts,” according to a former senior administration official.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each favored killing the upper-income tax cuts and continuing the middle-class tax cuts. But the Democratic caucuses in both chambers were not fully behind their leaders. With the grim midterm elections nearing, some nervous Democrats feared the Republicans would spend gobs of money on ads bashing them as tax hikers, even if they’d only said no to extending tax breaks for millionaires.

“We essentially reached the conclusion that it would be best if each individual senator fought this battle on their own terms,” a senior Democratic Senate aide said.

In other words, it was every man and woman for him- or herself.

Democrats on the Hill were griping that the White House was not effectively defending Obama’s actions, and there was no coordinated position on the tax question or a big message on the economy. “We just lacked a real battle plan heading toward the election,” a top White House official recalled.

IN AMERICAN POLITICS, AUGUST CAN BE A CRUEL AND SILLY month. A year earlier, in the summer of 2009, the Tea Party had waged an angry crusade against Obama’s health care initiative, advancing the false charge that it would establish death panels.

Summer 2010 saw a cable TV–fueled dustup focused on what critics were calling the “Ground Zero mosque”—an Islamic community center planned for Lower Manhattan, blocks away from where the Twin Towers had once stood. And Obama fell into the controversy.

At a White House iftar dinner on August 13, the president said he believed Muslims have “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

This remark led media outlets to report that Obama supported the Cordoba House project.

Then the next day, Obama explained, “I was not commenting, and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding.”

Nuance noted—but news reports treated Obama’s clarification as a retreat from the previous night’s statement. Fox News reported that Obama was “under fire” for his remarks.

“One of the things that got the president annoyed was frivolous cable TV debates,” Bill Burton recalled.

But that summer, Gibbs noted, “If people turned on the television and saw stories and shouting about BP and the mosque, they’d be right to ask, ‘Is anybody paying attention to what’s important in my life?’ ”

IN MID-AUGUST, OBAMA AND HIS ADVISERS FACED A NEW SET OF worries when a fresh crop of economic indicators made them wonder if the recovery, fragile as it was, was stalling out. On a family vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama held a conference call with his economic team.

We need new ideas that will generate jobs, he said, and he pressed them to devise options quickly. Obama’s aides were not optimistic that they could produce a practical jobs strategy that could win approval in Congress.

“What else could we do?” a senior administration official later recalled. “Crisis, war, the BP spill, and health care had already sucked up all the oxygen. We had been trying for months to find things. We kept getting overwhelmed. We tried for nine months to get a small business loan bill passed. And it hadn’t yet passed. That was outrageous. Once you lost the sixty votes in the Senate”—which happened the previous January when Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat—“it was tough.”

Summers was in charge of conveying ideas to the president. His lack of people-pleasing skills was hardly a secret, and he was regarded by some colleagues in the administration as an obstacle to policy progress.

“The NEC was the place where ideas go to die,” quipped a senior administration official who worked closely with Summers. Another aide said, “Larry was good at recognizing ideas—the ones he agreed with.”

As NEC director, Summers was supposed to be an honest broker. Yet he was a fellow who knew—or thought he knew—what made a good idea or a bad one, and he didn’t mind applying his own judgment.

He saw the need for more stimulus. But he disliked programs that sought to boost certain sectors—say, financing clean energy or high-speed rail. He didn’t believe such policies were effective. The Treasury Department sent over proposals to assist small businesses. Summers didn’t think they passed muster.

President Bill Clinton kept pitching an idea to Obama and others in the administration: use government bonds or loans to underwrite a massive rehabilitation of commercial real estate to render buildings more energy efficient. This was based on a retrofitting project at the Empire State Building. The former president had raised this idea so many times with administration officials that it had practically become a joke.

“Every time Clinton saw Obama, he’d press that,” recalled one senior administration official. “Obama would then ask Larry about it, and Larry would come back with fifty reasons not to do it.”

Summers had contacted people who worked on the Empire State Building project and concluded it could not easily be replicated. Summers saw himself as being rigorous—at a time when there was little margin for error. Yet others would point out that while Summers was nay-saying the ideas that flowed in, he wasn’t devising killer proposals of his own.

Christina Romer recalled that August 2010 was spent frantically “trying to come up with ideas.” In meetings, Obama’s economic advisers would envision a Venn diagram—one circle would contain policy prescriptions Democrats supported, the other had ideas Republicans favored—and they would concentrate on the intersection.

“It was vanishingly small,” Jared Bernstein recalled: infrastructure, small business assistance, tax cuts. “Job creation is a tough thing to do when the federal government is not willing to go all WPA-y, when we’re not creating direct jobs, not hiring thousands of people to build a dam,” Bernstein added.

At the same time, political aides kept telling the economic aides that voters didn’t want more spending. As a former senior administration official later noted, “The political people were saying, ‘Please don’t give us any more policy. Your policy is killing us.’ ”

“There was literally nothing you could do in the summer of 2010 that would create a job by November—even if we passed $400 billion of stimulus,” Ron Klain later said. “The policy people were stuck on a sofa scratching their heads. To make matters worse, John Maynard Keynes had been clubbed to death. No one wanted to stand up and say let’s spend more money.”

AFTER OBAMA RETURNED TO THE WHITE HOUSE, HE DELIVERED a prime-time speech announcing the end of the combat mission in Iraq and held a series of meetings with Middle East leaders to jump-start yet another peace process.

But on his first day back, he held a meeting with his economic team. More ideas, he urged them, more ideas.

Afterward, in the Rose Garden, he said: “My economic team is hard at work in identifying additional measures that could make a difference in both promoting growth and hiring in the short term, and increasing our economy’s competitiveness in the long term.”

But he had no details to offer. Obama also asked the Senate Republicans “to drop the blockade” against legislation that would provide loans and tax breaks to small businesses to encourage them to hire workers; it had been languishing in the Senate for months. Many Democrats thought it was too mild a rebuke, considering that the election season was starting.

The president and members of his economic team knew they needed to demonstrate their commitment to jobs, jobs, jobs, but they believed they had not received sufficient credit for having passed a variety of modest-sized jobs measures over the past year: cash for clunkers, expanded unemployment benefits, a tax credit for new home buyers, a tax credit for hiring, and a jolt of fiscal relief to the states that saved the jobs of thousands of teachers.

That might be so, but as the final leg of the 2010 campaign was beginning, the issue was not just policy realities but political image. If an unemployed person in Ohio were asked whether she believed that Obama and his crew were working 24/7 to revive the economy, what would the answer be?

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, THE PRESIDENT HIT THE ROAD—IN SORT of a kickoff of the fall campaign season. At Cuyahoga Community College, near Cleveland, Obama assailed the Republicans for cutting taxes for millionaires; for cutting regulations to help special interests; for cutting trade deals that didn’t benefit American workers; and for cutting back on investments in education, clean energy, research, and technology.

Their idea, he said scornfully, “was that if we just had blind faith in the market, if we let corporations play by their own rules, if we left everyone else to fend for themselves, that America would grow and America would prosper.”

All this, he said, had led to a weaker economy and falling wages—and a financial crisis that triggered the “worst recession of our lifetimes.”

He accused the Republicans of trafficking in fear and offering no more than the failed policies of the past.

Obama derided Representative John Boehner, the House Republican leader, for blocking that small business jobs bill backed by the Chamber of Commerce—“They’re making the same calculation they made just before my inauguration: if I fail, they win.”

He slammed Boehner for opposing other modest economic initiatives proposed by the White House: a boost in infrastructure spending, a research-and-development tax credit, and more generous provisions for businesses to write off investments in plants and facilities.

Obama noted that he wanted to make the middle-class tax cuts permanent, while the Republicans insisted on giving millionaires an extra $100,000 a year—which would force the US government to borrow another $700 billion to cover this revenue loss.

“We should not hold middle-class tax cuts hostage any longer,” he proclaimed.

Obama said little about the reckless Wall Streeters. He vowed to reduce the deficit. And he stuck with the frame he had first deployed the previous May at that fund-raising dinner: “Do we return to the same failed policies that ran our economy into a ditch, or do we keep moving forward with policies that are slowly pulling us out?”

He had hit all the obvious points, but he did not tap into the anger of the voting public. This was certainly an unconventional political moment, with unemployment so persistent and so high. Could conventional political strategizing prevent a Democratic wipeout at the polls? Perhaps not much could be done at this stage. Nevertheless, congressional Democrats were worrying that Obama was not punching Republicans hard enough or often enough.

MEETINGS WERE HELD IN THE OVAL OFFICE AND ELSEWHERE IN the White House, where Obama and his aides continued to hash out what to do about the expiring Bush tax cuts. Just about everyone favored undoing the high-income tax breaks, but Larry Summers voiced concern that such a battle could negatively affect business-class attitudes toward the president. As one senior official put it, Summers “really hated being accused of engaging in class warfare.”

David Axelrod contended that the Democrats on the Hill had the politics wrong and that a vote to end the top-bracket tax cuts would help them in the election.

But vulnerable House and Senate Democrats were still insisting that they did not want to take such a vote. Vice President Biden was fond of saying—during these deliberations and at other times—“You should never tell a politician you know his interests better than he knows his interests.”

“The polling clearly showed that the American people didn’t buy the argument that if you make $250,000 you shouldn’t pay more,” a senior administration official later said. “It was like a 70–30 spread in the polls. But we couldn’t translate this into votes on the Hill. You could show legislators this data, but they were convinced that the American people would see them as tax raisers.”

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, rendered earlier in the year, had unleashed outside groups to spend untold amounts of money—some of it from secret sources—against candidates, and pro-Republican outfits could be expected to exploit this decision and hurl millions of advertising dollars accusing Democrats of raising taxes.

In light of this, Obama told his aides there was not much he could do to persuade congressional Democrats: “These guys are the ones on the ballot. They’ll decide what’s best for them.”

He would not lead a pre-midterms fight on his own.

THERE WAS AN UPSIDE TO THE DEMOCRATS’ INTERNAL CONFLICT over the Bush tax cuts. Obama’s economic advisers started wondering if the president could use the tax-cut issue to advance other economic policies that Republicans would otherwise filibuster and kill in the Senate. After all, to extend the Bush tax cuts (for high-, middle-, and low-income earners), Congress would have to pass legislation.

The question became, could Obama graft a new bout of stimulus onto tax-cut legislation? according to a senior administration official.

Geithner, Summers, and others began considering what the White House could obtain in return for acquiescing to political reality. Extended unemployment benefits? Infrastructure spending? An additional middle-class tax cut that would pump up consumer demand? Obama and his aides were not, as they saw it, retreating on his campaign promise to bury Bush’s high-end tax cuts. They were putting a crisis to good use.

This strategic shift was not advertised. Most of the political world saw a brewing showdown over whether or not Obama would succeed in killing the upper-income tax cuts. But to Obama, it was not about winning the fight; it was about exploiting the fight.

“This was the policy choice: how to smuggle in more stimulus,” one Obama adviser later said. “And nobody—I mean nobody—in Congress was focused on this.”

WITH THE MIDTERM ELECTIONS UNDER WAY, THE STRATEGISTS at the DCCC believed that Obama was doing what he could for them in terms of raising money—no small task. But House Democrats, fearing the worst was hurtling their way, were exasperated with the president.

“There was an overarching frustration,” a top House Democrat recalled, “that the administration had not done a better job explaining what it had done—and what we had done—going back to the stimulus, to everything through the health care bill. We were going into the election almost defenseless, and susceptible to a serious charge: you’re not looking out for the economic interests of the country.”

At the White House, though, Obama and his aides were not convinced that nationalizing the election—having the president make campaign stops across the country to bash the GOP daily—would change anything.

“Everyone had hoped that the recovery would be stronger and faster,” a White House aide said. “Now we realized it wouldn’t confine itself to the campaign schedule.”

Obama, too, was irritated. In a meeting with a key adviser, he asked, “Why was it so much easier during the campaign to drive the message? We did it every day and it got through.” Obama felt he had saved the country from an economic depression, rescued the all-important auto industry, changed the rules for Wall Street to prevent another financial crash, enacted historic legislation reforming the health care system. Yet for all that, he and his party were still struggling.

“With all due respect,” the adviser replied, “you’re president of the United States. You have wars, oil spills, financial crises, pandemics—you have to respond to all of that. We used to just have to decide what speech to give and what ads to take out. Now you don’t have the clarity and simplicity of a campaign message. That’s the nature of the beast, especially at a time of abnormal events.”

“Yeah, but . . . ,” Obama said. “I hear all that. But we have to do better.”

OBAMA WASN’T CAMPAIGNING WITH CANDIDATES IN CONGRESSIONAL districts. Some Democrats complained about that, yet many others weren’t yearning for his presence. But he was stumping and decrying the Republicans. The president and his political strategists still believed that a large part of Obama’s appeal for independent and moderate voters was his reluctance to act in an overly partisan fashion. Having Obama slamming Republicans, one aide noted, “was damaging to our political brand. But he was willing to do this to help the Democrats. We knew this would hurt his numbers with independents.”

As election day neared, pollsters working with Democratic House incumbents told their clients that the forward-not-backward/in-the-ditch-or-out-of-the-ditch message had run its course and was no longer effective—especially with independents. Voters in many districts didn’t seem afraid to hand the keys to the car back to the Republicans.

The White House recalibrated its campaign message and began accusing the Republicans of being handmaidens of corporate special interests that were trying to steal the election by pouring huge amounts of secret money into races across the country.

Thanks to the Citizens United ruling, outside groups, including those set up by millionaires and industry associations, were indeed flooding congressional districts with millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads sliming candidates, and the voters couldn’t always tell who was behind the assault.

The president publicly decried this “flood of deceptive attack ads sponsored by special interests using front groups with misleading names.” Obama pointed out that he and Democrats had tried to pass a law that would force the sponsors of political ads to identify themselves and the sources of their funds—but Republicans had blocked the bill.

The president and his crew were promoting the specter of special interests plotting with a partisan minority in Congress to mount a “power grab” because Obama and the Democrats had dared to defy them with health care reform, Wall Street reform, and other measures. But top Democratic strategists working with the DCCC were not convinced the White House plan would work.

“I don’t know any professional politician who believes we could win an election by accusing the other side of spending too much money,” one complained after the elections. “That was just background noise to the economy. And we were engaged in some of the same stuff.”

This debate played out in an otherwise routine meeting at the White House on October 8. The communications office had called in a squad of Democratic strategists. Not for advice. The point was to share with these “talkers”—who appeared on the cable TV circuit—the White House’s strategy for the final weeks of the elections.

The White House held a meeting like this every few months and invited some version of this group, which included Dee Dee Myers, Peter Fenn, Simon Rosenberg, Kiki McLean, Jamal Simmons, and others.

Obama dropped by the meeting. He tried to shore up the partisan loyalists. He pointed out that Bill Clinton had done worse in the polls at this stage of his presidency, and unemployment in 1994 had been only 5.5 percent, not the current 9 percent. Noting that the Republicans and their allies were outspending the Democrats, he said, If it were a fair fight, we’d have better odds.

“It was more of an excuse than a way to address the situation,” one participant recalled.

After the president departed, David Axelrod said the remaining weeks would focus on one dramatic story line: the Republicans were stealing the elections with mystery groups spending too much secret special interest cash.

Several of the strategists agreed with this course, some said nothing, and others suggested ways to tweak the message. When it was consultant Chris Kofinis’s turn to weigh in, he let loose. At the time, Kofinis was advising Democratic congressional candidates around the nation. Every poll he had examined told him that voters’ number one issue was the economy—particularly, the absence of jobs.

“David, with all due respect,” Kofinis said, “this message won’t work.”

The room went silent. Kofinis continued: if the president and the White House hit the campaign trail assailing Citizens United, special interests, and money in politics, it wouldn’t resonate with voters; most people were unfamiliar with Citizens United and more concerned about the economy. Kofinis could not conceive of a more disconnected message for Democrats to take to the voters.

Axelrod countered that voters would respond to a Democratic attack on oil companies and other corporations that were buying influence and tilting the political system in their favor.

Kofinis understood the pernicious influence of corporate money but he insisted that voters were not fixated on such matters: “They’re focused on jobs.”

He was worried that if the White House and Democrats led with this argument, they would come across as out of touch. Voters dealing with tough economic times would come to believe, he said at the meeting, “we don’t get it.”

“This conversation wasn’t going to change anything,” one participant later said. “Everybody knew this wasn’t really working. But the White House was not going to rip up their strategy at this point. We all were just waiting for the storm to arrive.”

Two days later, Axelrod appeared on Face the Nation. That morning the Democratic Party had released an ad accusing Republican strategist Karl Rove and former GOP chairman Ed Gillespie (“Bush cronies”) and the Chamber of Commerce (“shills for big business”) of “stealing our democracy” by spending “millions from secret donors to elect Republicans to do their bidding in Congress.”

The spot showed a shadowy figure mugging a woman and absconding with her purse, and it ominously proclaimed, “It appears they’ve even taken secret foreign money to influence our elections.”

But the previous day, the New York Times had reported that the Chamber did not receive significant sums from its foreign affiliates, and moderator Bob Schieffer challenged Axelrod to back up this dramatic foreign money claim.

Axelrod couldn’t, but he noted that the existing rules prevented anyone from determining the source of the money for the Chamber’s massive campaign against Democratic House members. That was true, but the White House had botched its message. By zeroing in on the foreign money angle—which it couldn’t prove—it had served up a refutable charge that distracted from its main point: the GOP was in league with corporate interests to rig Congress in the favor of industry.

With three weeks to go before the election, is this the best Obama and the Democrats could do? Schieffer asked. To charge that there “may or may not be foreign money coming into the campaign”?

Axelrod reiterated the “fundamental” concern: Republicans and their backers “want to turn the clock back to the very same policies that got us into this mess in the first place, that exploded our deficits, that put the special interests in control . . . the oil industry, Wall Street, insurance industry.”

This was an accurate description, but Axelrod said nothing about the president’s achievements or any Democratic plans for dealing with the still-flagging economy. He was talking about the “threat to democracy,” not about putting people back to work. The two were linked—corporate-connected GOPers had blocked Obama initiatives to bolster the economy—but the White House was playing a bank shot.

Democrats felt they couldn’t run on their significant legislative accomplishments.

“That left us with Republican ethics,” a DCCC official said. “And that led to us not having a dialogue with voters about what they care about. There was no jobs message. The voters, rightly or not, saw debt as a contributing factor to the bad economy, and we were talking about who was spending what money in politics. We had an election driven by the enemy. Their message was simple: the Democrats are spending too much and it’s hurting the economy. There was no economic narrative coming out of the White House. Then again, perhaps no messaging tweaking could have affected what was about to happen.”

“We lost all hope in October,” a top White House official recalled. “We didn’t feel much of anything. We just had to let the ship hit the iceberg.”

ON ELECTION NIGHT, MANY WHITE HOUSE AIDES WENT HOME early, and the president headed off to the residence.